My Childhood - Maxim Gorky [47]
This was a tall, withered-looking, smoke-dried individual clad in a heavy sheepskin, with coarse hair on his fleshless, rusty face. He went about the streets, stooping, wavering strangely, and never speaking--gazing fixedly all the time at the ground. His iron-hued face, with its small, sad eyes, inspired me with an uneasy respect for him. Here was a man, I thought^ preoccupied with a weighty matter; he was looking for something, and it was wrong to hinder him.
The little boys used to run after him, slinging stones at his broad back; and after going on for some time as if he did not notice them, and as if he were not even conscious of the pain of the blows, he would stand still, throw up his head, push back his ragged cap with a spasmodic movement of his hands, and look about him as if he had but just awoke.
"Igosha with death in his pocket! Igosha, where are you going? Look out, Death in your pocket!" cried the boys.
He would thrust his hand in his pocket, then stooping quickly would pick up a stone or a lump of dry mud from the ground, and flourish his long arms as he muttered abuse, which was confined always to the same few filthy words. The boys' vocabulary was immeasurably richer than his in this respect. Sometimes he hobbled after them, but his long sheepskin hindered him in running, and he would fall on his knees, resting his black hands on the ground, and looking just like the withered branch of a tree; while the children aimed stones at his sides and back, and the biggest of them ventured to run quite close to him and, jumping about him, scattered handfuls of dust over his head.
But the most painful spectacle which I beheld in the streets was that of our late foreman, Gregory Ivanovitch, who had become quite blind, and now went about begging; looking so tall and handsome, and never speaking. A little gray-haired old woman held him by the arm, and halting under the windows, to which she never raised her eyes, she wailed in a squeaky voice: "For Christ's sake, pity the poor blind!" But Gregory Ivanovitch said never a word. His dark glasses looked straight into the walls of the houses, in at the windows, or into the faces of the passers-by; his broad beard gently brushed his stained hands; his lips were closely pressed together. I often saw him, but I never heard a sound proceed from that sealed mouth; and the thought of that silent old man weighed upon me torturingly. I could not go to him--I never went near him; on the contrary, as soon as I caught sight of him being led along, I used to run into the house and say to grandmother:
"Gregory is out there."
"Is he?" she would exclaim in an uneasy, pitying tone. "Well, run back and give him this."
But I would refuse curtly and angrily, and she would go to the gate herself and stand talking to him for a long time. He used to laugh, and pull his beard, but he said little, and that little in monosyllables. Sometimes grandmother brought him into the kitchen and gave him tea and something to eat, and every time she did so he inquired where I was. Grandmother called me, but I ran away and hid myself in the yard. I could not go to him. I was conscious of a feeling of intolerable shame in his presence, and I knew that grandmother was ashamed too. Only once we discussed Gregory between ourselves, and this was one day when, having led him to the gate, she came back through the yard, crying and hanging her head. I went to her and took her hand.
"Why do you run away from him?" she asked softly. "He is a good man, and very fond of